«all the ways i try to break wordpress»

Domain Mapping and SEO

I domain mapped this blog to a subdomain of archGFX earlier this month, based on the idea that it would be beneficial to the visibility of my main site. I’m not sure how successful that’s been, since i’m not really sure how all this works.

Google

google seems to be aware that sbk.wp.com = sbk.archgfx.net.

Except that external pagerank checkers don’t see things that way. sbk.archgfx.net gets 0 from blogflux’ pagerank checker, while sbk.wp.com still holds down a 6.
Also, as far as their blogsearch is concerned, sbk.wp.com is doing far better than sbk.archgfx.net, with no overlap in links.

Yahoo!

After changing my yahoo! site explorer account to check archgfx.net rather than http://www.archgfx.net, my inlinks doubled. That’s because they’re counting inlinks to sbk.wp.com as well, so they get the prize for handling the domain mapping the best.

Technorati

it pains me to even mention technorati. People who use technorati as any sort of metric, seem to also think that 10 is a valid sample size. Nonetheless, a technorati rank is some sort of badge of how cool you are. technorati falls prey to the same trap as google’s blogsearch, maintaining separate rankings for both addresses. having only looked at google and yahoo’s webmaster tools, i wasn’t aware that i hadn’t maintained my ranking, until i read //engtech’s rundown on trying to get technorati to fix their rankings. Technorati still removes anyone who gets their ranking by distributing blog software that links back to their site. That sort of lack of skill (google’s blogsearch is perfectly capable of removing backlinks to archgfx that come from disconnected) coupled with a lack of value for those who give back to the community really makes it hard to trust them.